Penelope Hobhouse,
As the grande dame of garden design, Penelope Hobhouse, prepares to celebrate her 90th birthday, she talks to Stephanie Mahon about her life in gardens
Penelope Hobhouse is planning a party. The grand dame of gardening turns 90 in November, and she will celebrate with as many friends as can squeeze into her son’s barn conversion in Somerset. A true Renaissance woman – gardener, writer, designer, lecturer, TV presenter – she has enjoyed a stellar career. There are few gardeners who are famous enough to have been on Desert Island Discs, or to have worked with Audrey Hepburn, but in self-deprecating fashion, she doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. “I’m amazed when someone mentions me in an article or something. Living here as a recluse, getting old, I think I’m lucky that people remember me at all.” She had little interest in gardening until she moved to her first husband’s family estate at Hadspen House in Somerset, and took on the eight-acre garden, but it was at Tintinhull, the National Trust garden where she lived with her second husband John Malins, that she started to build her name. “I had known the owner, Phyllis Reiss, who made the garden, and I adored it. When we moved there in 1979, it was a bit of a mess, so it was a great challenge to make it as beautiful as she had it.”
She had first seen the garden as a visitor, unaware that 20 years later, she would be the one to restore it. Established by Reiss in the 1930s and 1940s, Tintinhull is a garden of rooms in the vein of Hidcote or Sissinghurst. “The layout is essentially formal, constructed in a grid pattern, with lawns, paths and hedges all meeting at right angles. I loved the perfect proportions, and the concept of compartments that provided the opportunity to try out different schemes – some full of bright colours, others mainly green and peaceful. At Tintinhull, I was the decorator rather than the designer, using Mrs Reiss’s inspired ‘bones’ as the background to all the planting.”
Her work there and her research into Gertrude Jekyll led to her first book, Colour in Your Garden (1984), which was a resounding success at home and abroad, and led to many more books and a shift into design work. “I was lucky because a family friend knew that the Rothschilds were looking for someone to redesign their Royaumont gardens in Île-de-France, and suggested me. That led to working in Germany for the fashion designer Jil Sander. And when you go to America, and on your CV it says you worked for a Rothschild and Jil Sander, that’s all you need.”
Soon she was getting lots of calls asking her to create gardens like the ones in her book, and one summer travelled to America nine times. At first, she requested that her clients also hire a landscape architect to manage the construction detailing, but she soon took on her own associates, Simon Johnson in the UK and Nan Sinton in the USA.
Notable public commissions include the Herb Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, with a central box parterre surrounded and infilled with a profusion of edibles and herbs in pastel shades; a garden for The Queen Mother at Walmer Castle in Kent, influenced by her interest in Islamic gardens, with a rectangular pool and arched pavilion; and the Upper Walled Garden at Aberglasney in Wales, where yew cones offer height in flower beds laid out in the shape of a Celtic cross. Her designs often featured a strong structural layout, within which she plants in a looser, more informal way.
She hit the lecture circuit with contemporaries such as John Brookes, Rosemary Verey and James van Sweden. She presented TV shows, wrote more books, and created private gardens for wealthy clients, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs. Working in places as diverse as Texas, California, Detroit and the Inner Hebridean island of Oronsay
Few gardeners are famous enough to have been on Desert Island Discs, or to have worked with Audrey Hepburn
Penelope Hobhouse’s design principles continued
to create a strong structure or framework for my gardens, with looser planting within. The architecture can be supplied by buildings, walls, steps and pergolas, but also by plants.
The cardinal rule for planting is to use bright colours sparingly. Form is much more important than colour, and flowers are fleeting, so start instead with the shapes and hues of trees, hedges and shrubs, and the leaf form and colour of herbaceous plants, the shape they make and the height they grow to. Plant in strong masses and repeat core plants throughout a scheme.
Appropriate planting is vital to the success of any garden. Choose plants that will not only do well in any particular spot but will also associate happily with any indigenous neighbouring plants.
To help unite the house and garden and create flow, repeat hard or soft features.
Gardens should also provide shade and shelter, seats for contemplation, scents and solitude, and require just the amount of maintenance to encourage relaxation, because, above all, they are places to be enjoyed.
meant she was constantly learning about new plants for different climate zones and adapting her ideas to suit the site and situation. One of her greatest challenges in this regard, the cliff-top Bass Garden in Maine, was also one of the gardens she enjoyed making the most. “It was on an island, very exposed on the coast facing the Atlantic Ocean, which presented all sorts of difficulties.” These experiences reinforced her commitment to using plants in the right place, inspired by her great friend Beth Chatto. “Far more jarring to me than any garish colour combination is the sight of plants with entirely different cultural requirements growing alongside one another.”
It was during these frenetic years of designing that Penelope moved to the Coach House in Bettiscombe, Dorset, where she finally had the opportunity to make a garden from scratch. “I was working full time and away a lot, so it had to be a sensible garden, but I still loved it.” She had planned it all out with her husband John before he died – a walled garden, with formal axes, a central lawn and flower beds, and an avenue of yew pillars delineating an orchard meadow, and later a gravel garden with central square pool and tender planting, with the rolling Dorset hills as a backdrop. It cemented her reputation as a gifted plantswoman with an historical grounding but a progressive approach.
She has now come full circle, and is back in Somerset, where she has created an ebulliently planted little courtyard garden. Her trademark structure is provided by clipped Phillyrea lactifolia, which echo each other across a central path, with symmetrical beds either side planted up in a flowering profusion of cool, calming colours. Large pots punctuate corners and doorways, and she can enjoy the view from both inside and out, just how she likes it. “When I came back here at 83, I gave up being a designer, and I knew this was going to be my last garden,” she says. “I decided to do it just for me. Me, and the cat.”
When I came here at 83, I knew this was going to be my last garden, so I decided to do it just for me. Me, and the cat